David Smith

"There are interesting debates to be had about technology, social media, citizen journalism and eye witness accounts, but sadly Carr’s post touches on none of them in any meaningful way. I am befuddled as to why people on Twitter are seizing on it as breaking new ground, as it simply doesn’t." - David Smith

"This is how a lot of web stuff feels to me right now. We're looking for ways to escape this way of thinking, but we're just encrusting the old model with new sub-assemblies." - David Smith

"Her close colleagues speak of her blazing sense of justice and her fearless readiness to fight injustice. She was not a comfortable person to have on a committee as a member. Where a chair might just be reaching a compromise, she would always be ready to raise issues that others had wanted left in the long grass. She preferred relevant issues to be brought out into the open and resolved. What made her popular was her sense of fun. She was a serious reformer but never a solemn one. People came out of the boards she chaired with a feeling they had been at a party. She was audacious, uninhibited and endearing. … Her readiness to challenge authority made her an ideal lay appointee on the General Medical Council's disciplinary committee. She was already familiar with self-important people within legal circles, but was shocked to find a phalanx of medical knights who could clearly be as pompous." - David Smith

"if Whitehall viewed him as a safe, establishment figure, their expectations were soon shattered by his articulate reports, condemning, in forthright prose, the conditions that he saw. … There was … a family clue to his involvement with causes that engaged him passionately. His two eldest daughters were born profoundly deaf, and his work for the deaf culminated in his becoming chairman of the National Deaf Children's Society. … From the start of his chief inspectorate, he used his lack of knowledge with devastating effect. He considered that his independence, and layman's status, allowed him "to ask very basic questions and press for answers." "He had little time for performance measures and other management tools. Did a place feel right? Were the staff enthusiastic? Did prisoners walk with a spring in their step? These were his tests. They reflected his character: playful, cavalier even, but with a clear understanding that institutions are about people before processes." - David Smith

"that’s the really amazing thing – that there might be a determination, en-masse – to really get the blood pumping and make our way out of the messes we’ve created. … Please stay excited, please stay making." - David Smith

"The changes that are required to the interface to really achieve the goal that we were tasked with – to really make Drupal understandable to Verity & Jeremy has the consequence of making Drupal a less efficient and enjoyable place for Drupal developers to build cool stuff. … There are a number of ways that we can address the experience of non-technical users of Drupal and to ‘productise’ Drupal as a content management system. The most obvious is to design and develop an admin theme that is specifically targeted at these end users that can be applied by developers once the development work is done and the site is being handed over for administration. I’m not sure where the incentive to design and develop this theme comes from" - David Smith

"Apple prefers to hide complexity within the technology whereas the open source approach puts the complexity on the surface of the device in order to expose advanced functionality and greater transparency into how to directly manipulate the device. … beautiful, usable technology in the marketplace need not be the exclusive domain of the proprietary — but so far I’ve see little indication that open source developers take seriously the need for simpler, easier, and more intuitive future-forward interfaces. Perhaps I’m wrong or just uninformed, but so long as products like the OpenOfficeMouse continue to characterize the norm in open source design, I’m not likely going to be able to soon recommend open source solutions to anyone but the most advanced and privileged users." - David Smith

"The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures. The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government?" "blue is the colour of hyperlinks. It’s the colour of the virtual, of potential, of what might be beyond this link. It’s the colour of what’s about to come. It’s the colour of possibility. It’s the true colour of the web. … The web is the colour of the future." - David Smith

"It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space. Humanity's habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior—the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space." via Matt - David Smith

"thick and humane descriptions of everyday life from our recent past. How can you not like a book that manages to turn the memoirs of Noddy Holder into a rich historical archive? Every so often Kynaston interrupts the narrative with these wonderfully evocative lists: "Dabitoff, Windolene, Duraglit, Brasso, Brillo, Lifebuoy, Silvikrin, Ammi-dent, Delrosa Rose Hip Syrup, Mr Therm, Toni Perms, Hairnets, head-scarves, Ladybird T-shirts, rompers, knicker elastic, cycle clips, brogues, Start-rite, Moss Bros, crests on blazers, ties as ID, AA patrolmen, driving gloves, Austin Cambridge, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam Talbot, indicator wings, sidecars, Raleigh, Sturmey-Archer, I Spy, Hornby Dublo, Tri-ang, Dinky, Meccano, Scalextric, Subbuteo, Sarah Jane dolls, Plasticine, Magic Robot, cap guns, Capstans, Player’s Navy Cut, Senior Service, cigarette boxes, Dagenham Girl Pipers, Saturday-morning cinema, Uncle Mac, Nellie the Elephant, The Laughing Policeman, Napkin rings, butter knives, volauvents …"" - David Smith

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009..., http://twitter.com/timbern... - David Smith

http://google-produkt-kompass.... - David Smith

"The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. … TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. … Given the latency of space communications and the minimal power restrictions placed upon satellites, DTNs approach seems prudent. … most people don't have a need for regular satellite communication … but Cerf sees his robust protocol having more down-to-Earth applications. Mobile networks, for example, must regularly cope with long periods of delay or loss … Perhaps looking to gain an edge on its competitors, Google has already integrated DTN into Android's networking stack." - David Smith

"The good news is that I've accepted a position to frolic around and play with the trouble-makers that are Stamen Design because "it seems like too good an opportunity and one that I would always wonder about if I'd said no". It's not often you get to say something like that twice in a row and in the immortal words of Gibby Haynes: "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done." That's what I told myself five years ago, anyway." - David Smith

"It is hard to escape the conclusion that Cameron and George Osborne can adopt policies that are so harmful towards ordinary people and the poor because they have never really known any. Barely a week passes without Osborne making a slip showing he is surreally out of touch. He recently claimed his inheritance tax cut on properties worth £1m would be enjoyed by people living in ex-council houses. He then said his £20,000 a year private school, St Paul's, is "incredibly liberal" because "your mother could be the head of a giant corporation, or a solicitor in Kew." If you think council houses are worth a million quid and solicitors in Kew are the lowest rung on the social ladder you can imagine, how does it affect your policies?" - David Smith

"Legible London is a new pedestrian wayfinding system to help people walk around the Capital. We're piloting the system in three areas to make sure it will be effective across London." - David Smith

"News Corp CEO appears to be finding it more challenging than expected to introduce paywalls for papers including the Sun, the Times, the New York Post and the Australian when he said last night: "I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date." The target date was announced three months ago, but a lack of solidarity from other newspaper organisations including the Guardian, which has stressed that its website will continue to remain free, seems to have Murdoch double-thinking his plans." - David Smith

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks. - David Smith

"most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual. … For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress." - David Smith